[webkit-dev] strategy for evaluating performance issues related to memory.

[Jens Alfke]

On Jun 21, 2010, at 11:59 AM, Mike Marchywka wrote:

> I guess I could do some profiling my self and empirically
> find problems and just assume that no one has specific comments on suspects or things they have observed
> as possible problems. 

I spent a couple of months last year looking at memory usage of WebKit in Chromium, using tools like Shark and vmmap. I was able to tweak a couple of things for some measurable improvements, like shaving bytes off of each String object, but people have been optimizing this code for years, and believe me, there isn’t any low-hanging fruit left in there.

Further optimization, IMHO, would need to be done by someone who’s a real expert at some of the high-level data structures involved (like the render tree, say) who can figure out a way to represent the same information in more compact or lazier form. Don’t assume that you can just walk into the codebase for the first time and start optimizing.

—Jens